Generic MIDI Learn

Philosophy

There are no "best" ways to map an arbitrary MIDI controller for
controlling Ardour. There may be very legitimate reasons for different
users to prefer quite different mappings.

On every platform that Ardour runs on, there are excellent
free-of-charge tools for making connections between MIDI hardware and
"virtual" MIDI ports like the ones that Ardour creates and
uses. Rather than waste precious developer time replicating these
connection/patch managers, we prefer to leverage their existence by
having users rely on them to actually connect Ardour to other MIDI
devices and software. On OS X, we recommend Pete Yandell's MIDI
Patchbay. On Linux, a wide variety of tools are available including
QJackctl, aconnect, Patchage, and more.

The binding is complete. Moving the hardware should control the Ardour fader etc.

Cancelling a Learned MIDI Binding

To unlearn a learned MIDI binding, Middle-click
on the control in the same way as you did to learn it in the first place, but
click on the popup to cancel it.

Avoiding work in the future

If you want the bindings you set up to be used automatically in every
session, the simplest thing to do is to use Session > Save
Template. Then, when creating new sessions, select that template and
all the bindings will be automatically set up for you.